So last year I thought it’d be nice to read through Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels in order but I never got around to starting. I also failed to touch any of the Hugo-nominated works despite jetting off to Worldcon in Helsinki.

Instead, I read quite a bit for work (National Young Writers’ Festival: Findlay, Sala, Tozer and Bowe) and quite a bit of short stuff, ie short story collections, essay collections and novellas, which comprised more than a fifth of my reading. That’s likely to remain high despite a pledge to read longer form work because I’ve committed to read the Sydney Story Factory’s student novella collection as well as JY Yang’s The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune novella duo.

Not as many series this year as last, just Gentill’s trilogy and a few pairs/second books (de Frombelle, Tozer, Ward, Jinks) but quite a number of debut authors (about a quarter of the list). No rereads, which surprised me. Then again, I have a to-be-read list that’s bigger than my shelf space, thanks to my tendency to purchase on Kindle as soon as a book takes my fancy. I bought Philip Pullman’s TheBook of Dust, so I’m likely to reread the His Dark Materials trilogy when I turn my mind to the new work.

I’ve started about three collections so they’re going to be swift additions to my next list once I sit down and finish them like a proper reader. There’s also a growing to-be-read pile of tea books that I often dip into for reference but haven’t read all the way through. Most of them are meant to be read like that, but I’d like to do some solid reading.

Interestingly, reading Ruins and Chinaman, both set in Sri Lanka, has catapulted Sri Lanka to the top of my travel list so we’ll see how that pans out as a destination in the coming year. Add to that tea! glorious tea! and it sounds like my kind of trip, eh?

Once again series dominated my reading, particularly fantasy, and my non-fiction reading was largely confined to memoir and tea books. I noticed a lot more sexy reading than previous years (though a conscious effort to read outside my usual genres did result in finishing three not-great romance novellas) but also an increase in offbeat fiction by Jane Rawson, Marlee Jane Ward, Julie Koh and Briohny Doyle.

A surprise hit for me was CS Pacat’s Captive Prince trilogy, which was not just a page-turning queer action/adventure/romance series but written with precision and panache, an artfully constructed plot without sacrificing character development. Yes, you read my list correctly: I read it twice in a row.

This year I have a mixed genre pile I aim to get through in the next few months (comprising authors from Kate Tempest and Cory Doctorow to Matthew Reilly and Annabel Crabb) before starting a rereading project of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. I’m heading to Finland for the World Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki this August too, so no doubt there’ll be a Hugo list to tackle in the weeks leading up to the ballot.

If you want my take on any of the above, hit me up in the comments or on Twitter (@witmol).

A long time ago in another life I was a finalist for a fairly prestigious writing award, the Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year. It was 1997 and I had already had a good year, having come second in a Baulkham Hills Shire poetry competition.

Fancying myself a wordsmith, I had entered the SMH comp before but that year was determined to try for an encouragement award (one step up from a ‘participation’ award, I was assured). I submitted a piece I had written for class, though I’d worked on it a little more to refine it and promptly forgot about it in the buzz of year 11 exams.

I don’t remember how I was notified, exactly. I’m assuming my diary at the time captured the moment, but suddenly I was one of 15 finalists in the state invited to lunch for the announcement of the award. You would have figured out by now that I didn’t win but it truly didn’t matter as I had already overshot my objective to achieve an encouragement award.

(Incidentally, I met the winner Mark Bolotin several years later at a private creative open mic night called Magical Theatre held in a garage in Glebe, in Sydney’s inner west. It was the same platform that launched the indie band Richard in Your Mind. The world works in mysterious ways.)

Later that year I also took out my school’s inaugural senior creative writing award and the next year, won the senior poetry competition.

It was a couple of years later, in second year uni, when I realised that I hadn’t finished anything of quality for some time. I had a conversation with my friend, a fellow student called Justin Green (who I thought I was in love with at the time and who was the subject of much average poetry). He knew how I felt – he had been a finalist for the SMH comp in the year before I’d been – but he told me something important: “You never lose it.”

I had my annual review at work today. Four years I’ve been employed at this company. Four years in which I haven’t finished anything of quality. But I went to writing group this evening armed with a few hundred words that I’d bashed out between 5.30 and 6pm and those words were accepted. They could be worked, they could be teased into shape, according to my fellow writers (one is a Varuna scholar, she would know!). So I have faith that I will never lose it, but it’s almost like I have to set it free, let it run rampant.

On the way home I considered how many words I have typed, how many words I have had published in the years since 1997. I’m a decent magazine journo and freelancer and I’ve carved a small niche for myself in the business and project management space. All this serves someone else.

I blog and I tweet (and every night I write a longhand debrief of my day). All this has taught me is to become accustomed to writing what I feel. I want to stop this. I want to stop writing what I feel and restart writing what I imagine. Only then will I know that I haven’t lost it.

(P.S: I wrote this blog post instead of working on the second draft of my novel or the new 3,000 short story I have in the works. I do recognise the irony.)